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Pentagon officials are urging lawmakers not to make any changes until a panel makes its recommendations more than a year from now. Lawmakers, meanwhile, say immediate change is necessary to roll back what they see as a grave mistake tucked into the two-year budget deal.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin says he does not support the cuts because they cherry-pick a single group — military retirees — to help solve the nation’s budget woes.

“I believe it is unfair to single out military retirees in a federal deficit reduction effort,” the Michigan Democrat said Tuesday during a committee hearing on military pensions.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte agreed.

“What worries me about this is that it was a huge disconnect from Washington in terms of those who have sacrificed the most, that they would be the one group targeted in all of this,” the New Hampshire Republican said.

Ayotte and nearly a dozen other lawmakers have proposed various ways to roll back the cuts, saying they should never have been under the budget ax.

Pentagon officials, however, emphasized that reforming the military’s compensation system is unavoidable.

“Secretary [Chuck] Hagel, the Joint Chiefs and the service secretaries agree that we cannot afford to sustain the rate of growth in military compensation that we’ve experienced over the last decade,” said acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox.

And Vice Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Sandy Winnefeld told the committee the Pentagon “can and probably should gradually place compensation on a more sustainable trajectory.”

Under the recent two-year budget agreement, military retirees under the age of 62 would see their pensions increase at a slower pace, with their cost-of-living adjustments pegged to the rate of inflation minus 1 percentage point. Once they turned 62, they would go back to receiving adjustments pegged to the full rate of inflation.

The pension cuts, set to take effect Dec. 1, 2015, initially extended to all working-age military retirees. But the $1.1 trillion spending bill that cleared Congress earlier this month gave a pass to disabled veterans and surviving families, a move the Pentagon supports.

Pentagon officials, to her knowledge, were not consulted on the details of the budget agreement brokered by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Fox said. But the department “fully supported” the provision in the omnibus spending bill that restored the cuts for disabled veterans.

But, Fox added, the proposal, which would save the department roughly $500 million a year in reduced retirement accrual payments, is not without flaws.

The department, she said, would not support the cost-of-living adjustment for working-age military retirees unless it included a grandfather clause that would exempt current service members and retirees.

Republicans on the committee were outraged the cuts were included in the budget deal they voted for without consulting the Pentagon.

“To my knowledge, there were no [Defense Department] officials consulted. We heard about it in the end game, as other people did,” Winnefeld said.

Ayotte, also a member of the Senate Budget Committee, called it “outrageous” that there hadn’t been greater transparency.

And her Republican colleague, Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, said the deal “came from behind closed doors and was authored by two individuals and presented as a package, take it or leave it.”

“If this had seen the light of day, the elected representatives of the American people … would never have stood for this broken promise,” he said.

Murray, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman who was one of the chief negotiators of the budget deal, declined to respond in detail on Tuesday, or say explicitly whether she had consulted Defense Department officials on the cuts.